Dick, Joe, Scooter, Val
Want me to put the whole Plame-gate affair into one line?
I will anyway: someone who didn’t do it is on trial for something that is even a crime.
At the end of each witness’s testimony in the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, after prosecutors and defense attorneys examined and cross-examined, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton asked jurors to write down any questions they had. Walton would then look through the papers, decide which questions were appropriate and pose them to the witness.
Now, as the case heads to the jury, those queries are our best hints about what jurors are thinking.
But last week there was a moment when we got a hint not from a question that Walton asked, but from one he refused to ask. After the testimony of star prosecution witness Tim Russert, Walton scanned the jurors’ queries and announced, “There is going to be one question I’m not going to ask. I’ve concluded that that question is not appropriate and therefore you should not speculate as to what the response would have been.”
What was he talking about? A moment later, Walton told the jurors: “What Mrs. Wilson’s status was at the CIA, whether it was covert or not covert, is not something that you’re going to hear any evidence presented to you on in this trial.”
“Whether she was, or whether she was not, covert is not relevant to the issues you have to decide in this case,” he said.
It is The Thing That Cannot Be Spoken at the Libby trial.
You do have to feel sorry for the Left. They set sail with dreams of hauling in marlins and tarpin like Cheney and Rove. What they got, all due respect to Scooter, was a sucker fish.